Q&A: Harry Potter Director David Yates Talks Deathly Hallows

For a while there, the Harry Potter films were shaping up to be the next Alien franchise: one hip director after the next taking up the relay, reinterpreting the source material, and making it his own. But like a bright young thing who dates around in her early, adventurous days—leaping from a successful Hollywood director (Chris Columbus) to a refined Englishman (Mike Newell), to a dangerous, swarthy Mexican (Alfonso Cuarón)—the franchise eventually found the man it wants to spend the rest of its life with: David Yates. Mama Rowling approves. After all, Yates is an honest-to-Hogwarts Potter fan, has the soft and lilting voice of a bedside storyteller, and he’s a nice British boy, so it’s keeping it in the family.

Yates, who cut his teeth directing hit miniseries for British television, had little experience directing feature films before being entrusted with the last two films of the multi-billion-dollar franchise. As the record-breaking success of the current film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, reveals, Warner Bros. have made good on their bet. After Yates puts out the last two installments, he will be the director must identified with the series. Currently filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Yates spoke to VF Daily about his awesome responsibility, both to the fans and to the studio.

Julian Sancton: First of all congratulations on your success. It looks as if you have been given the thumbs up. Are you relieved?

David Yates: Yes of course. It was terrific. It’s quite nerve-wracking. You never want to be the director who dropped the ball, you know? It’s a very curious experience because we finished the film a while ago and we are still in the thick of doing the next two parts. We’ve moved on quite a bit from where we were with it. It’s lovely that people are so positive. It’s lovely the box office is so exciting and all of that. But I had to sew in the next stage of this journey so it’s a really odd feeling.

I would imagine, because you are already thinking of Harry in a different way and you are already invested in a different part of the story.

Completely. And the characters are getting older, the actors are getting older, and we leave Hogwarts behind in the next movie. We always say—I did it on [installment] five, I did it on [installment] 6—“Oh these films are growing up. They’re getting darker.” That really does feel the case when you leave the school behind and you are outside in the real world. It’s a very different dynamic. It’s really exciting actually.

Why did you and Warners decide to split the last installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts?

Three reasons. One is it’s a huge book so there’s so much stuff in it. You go through the list of things you want to put in the movie and there’s so many huge set pieces that by the time you get to the end of it you kind of go, “Whoa this would be the most expensive movie of all time.” Far more expensive than any conventional blockbuster. You have to find a way of somehow keeping all the things you want to do, so it is easy to split it across two films. [Screenwriter] Steve Kloves was working on the adaptation as we were shooting Half-Blood Prince and he just rounded us up and said, “Look guys I am having a real problem stuffing this story into two-and-a-half hours. I think narratively this might suit two parts.” There was that. I get frustrated when fans say, ‘Why didn’t you put this in or put that in?’ So it was a combination of the adaptation process and the fact that I just want to give the audience everything we can from the book, basically.

It also gives the fans something else to look forward to because the books ended so abruptly for people.

It’s nice because we are having such a fun time doing these stories. It’s kind of hard. You just want to enjoy the journey basically and that’s what we will do with Hallows.

You are the steward of a work that is terribly important to millions of people. How do you balance the expectations of devoted fans and those of Harry Potter neophytes?

Well, you just do your very best. I’m a Harry Potter fan. Everyone who is working on this screenplay and the films is. I’m surrounded by Harry Potter fans every day. So we try our best to realize the spirit of the world. At the end of the day, I have to please that Potter audience but I’ve also got to balance that with people who may have never read one of these books. It’s a very difficult juggling act but you just do your very best to make the film as in-the-moment as possible and you have to make certain choices, which are difficult at times, which just make that adaptation fit more into that cinematic experience in the theater.

Can you give me an example of a particularly difficult choice you had to make in this last film?

One of the things we did was we added a sequence in the middle of the movie—the sequence in the reeds when death eaters try and attack Harry—and that sequence never existed in the book. In one sense it seems mad to add something to Jo’s [read: J.K. Rowling’s] world and Jo’s book. It’s already full of pretty rich, fantastic stuff—why on earth would you add anything? But in the sort of two-and-a-half hour structure of a screenplay there was a lack of a sense of jeopardy from the outside. We were in all these romantic entanglements and I needed to audience to be reminded of what the threat was from the outside world. Jo talks about those things in the background in the book but halfway through our book we needed our audience in the theater to be aware of them and to experience them. So we added a sequence that didn’t existed in the book but was there, I guess, in spirit because it was happening beyond Hogwarts.

Did you run it by J.K. Rowling? I’m sorry: by “Jo”?

Yeah, Jo was totally cool about it. She recognized the challenge of it and the need for it.

Why do you think this is the movie to be setting all the records? Why this one out of all the films?

My theory is, these movies were conceived as children’s movies, ultimately, earlier on. There was a demographic that may have found that a bit of turn off. It still reached one of the biggest segments possible: the family audience. I think what is happening is, as they get older and the material gets a bit darker and it gets a bit more complicated and gets a bit edgier and gets a bit realer, it all starts to get a bit cooler. I think that starts to bring in a whole new demographic. It starts to bring a whole new bunch of people who don’t perceive it so much as a kid’s film any more. That’s one possibility. The other fact is Jo’s books are capturing an audience all the time because people have been growing up with the books and they read it to their kids so you’ve got this endless cycle of kids coming to the material. I think there are several reasons. I also just think there hasn’t been a [new] book so and we’ve all been missing that, so the film kind of fills that vacuum a little bit. There is a real nostalgia for the world.

How much creative leeway do you allow yourself? Do you ever miss the experimentation that you were allowed to have on TV?

I experiment plenty on these films. I have exactly the same freedoms and take the same liberties and make the same choices and try things all the time. I am serving the story. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, first and foremost. The studio was pretty hands-off and generally quite supportive. They recognize we just get on with it. They are there with notes in the final stage of the process when were finally getting the film ready for the audience even then they are really supportive and respectful. I think you will find the next film quite a departure from the sixth film.

Why?

It’s just edgier. It’s a little rawer. It’s more contemporary. It feels more modern. Shooting in the way we’ve been shooting, doing a lot of hand-held camera work, all that stuff, I’ve never got a call from the studio. They just phone up or email and say we love the dailies even though I am doing things that feel very not Harry Potter. So I feel I have a freedom and the elbowroom to do what I feel the story requires.

So you’re hearkening back to your gritty days of State of Play?

Yeah, indeed. In Harry Potter Seven, part One, very much so. But, of course, Hallows part Two brings that fantasy world back in full cinemascope. It’s full of dragons, and big wizard battles, and magic. To keep the thing interesting for me as a filmmaker, I want to serve the wonderful stories Jo has given us but I need to move it around a bit. I can’t feel that I am making the same film. Tonally, I need to shake it up a bit. Like Half-Blood Prince had a lot more humor in it than Order of the Phoenix and that was important for me, and I think it was important for the audience to not get the same journey. And Hallows part One will feel very different than Half-Blood Prince.

It’s very much like the great trilogies or the great franchises, like Star Wars, where each movie has a different tone. This one will be referred to the as the bawdy one.

Yeah, I hope so.

You‘ll have directed the most number of Harry Potter movies. How do you feel about being identified so strongly with the franchise?

I’m really cool about that. It sort of raises the bar somewhat when I leave Potter and I move on and start doing other stuff. It will be a challenge, I think, because there are so many things I want to do after Potter. I’m not wishing it away because I’m having such a great time doing this films, it’s a real privilege, its so much fun. I enjoy the people. I’m just looking forward to lots of stuff afterward.

What’s the first thing you are going to do next?

I’ve got a couple of things. I want to do a war picture. I’m developing a war picture called Saint Nazaire that’s about a reckless commander raid in the Second World War. I want to make a movie version of the TV thing I did called Sex Traffic, about trafficking. There’s a whole pile of stuff coming out. I am reading stuff all the time.

Why do you think British miniseries are so popular over here? We do we keep stealing them?

[Laughs] I don’t know. You’re going to have to tell me that because you keep on stealing them. I have no idea—I’m a Brit.